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Freedom to Marry Week: Bringing It Home

The Bilerico Project
February 14, 2010
Editors' Note:Guest blogger Marc Solomon is the
marriage director of Equality California, where he focuses on overturning Prop 8
and restore the freedom to marry in the state. Before joining EQCA, Marc led the
successful fight to protect marriage equality in Massachusetts as the executive
director of MassEquality. He also helped with the efforts in Connecticut,
Vermont and Maine.

Once again it's been a year of exalting ups and difficult downs, but having
worked on the freedom to marry pretty much non-stop since 2001, I am very
optimistic about the course ahead. I wanted to share some of my reflections with
you, on California and the nation, both for the last year and the year
ahead.

The year began in Vermont with the historic accomplishment of gaining the
freedom to marry through an act of a legislature rather than a court,
over-riding the cynical veto of Gov. Jim Douglas. (California's legislature
twice passed EQCA-sponsored bills that would have established the freedom to
marry, but both were vetoed by the governor.) New Hampshire and Maine followed
suit with legislative victories, and the Washington, D.C. City Council approved
marriage equality by a huge margin. Same-sex couples will soon be able to marry
atop Mount Everest in Nepal and, closer to home in Mexico City, a source of both
pride and renewed commitment to many Californians of Mexican heritage whom I've
spoken with. In court, we saw the powerful combo of Ted Olson and David Boies
pull any veneer of respectability off our opponents' canards. While we couldn't
watch on television, we read about our opponents pulling witness after witness
because they knew their arguments would topple under cross-examination.

Here in California, we passed a law clarifying that same-sex couples married
before November 2008 in other places are legally married here, and couples
marrying elsewhere after that date gain all the rights and protections of
marriage. Thousands of EQCA supporters kept the pressure on their
representatives and Gov. Schwarzenegger to make this happen.

Of course, not all the news was good this year. Despite outspending our
opponents and running a powerful field-focused campaign in Maine, we still came
up a few percentage points short. Many EQCA field organizers and board members
joined the fight on "volunteer vacations," and hundreds of EQCA volunteers
manned phone banks from home, making 25,000 calls to turn out pro-equality
voters. Painfully, the New York and New Jersey legislatures voted down marriage
legislation in spite of intensive organizing work by our sister
organizations.

Even with setbacks along the way, we are winning. Every state that comes our
way, every "unusual suspect" that makes the case for equality, every country
that begins marrying same-sex couples, is making history. In each of those
locations, as same-sex couples actually marry, we are able to show the
difference between the reality of same-sex couples' marriages--the truth of our
lives--as compared to the fears which our opponents try to peddle.

Bringing It Home to Cali

I'm hopeful for a good outcome in the federal case against Prop. 8 and deeply
proud of the great work of Olson, Boies and the American Foundation for Equal
Rights. But we can't just wait and depend on the courts to do the right thing
and affirm our rights. We have to keep building support for the freedom to marry
so that no matter the outcome in the court, we know we can keep strengthening
LGBT rights and fend off the attacks our opponents try to launch against us.

Through our Let California Ring educational campaign, EQCA has built close
partnerships with organizations in the Latino, African-American and
Asian-Pacific Islander communities, and we are working together to build support
among non-LGBT people of color. Interestingly, in our door-to-door canvasses
Latinos and African-Americans have demonstrated the greatest likelihood of
becoming more supportive. Many are telling our canvassers that no one on our
side has ever before engaged them in conversation.

Our 20 field organizers operating out of 10 offices across California have
formed close partnerships with coalition partners, communities of faith and
organized labor and are leading persuasion canvasses. In places like the Inland
Empire, LGBT organizing has never been carried out with such focus and rigor
before, and last weekend we had our first Spanish language canvass in Riverside.
In total, our field organizers have organized and led 137 canvasses over the
past 9 months. If you live in California, we need you to join up! It may feel
difficult, or unpleasant, but I can tell you our volunteers find it an
exceptionally empowering experience to have real conversations with people on
this issue. People are usually willing to talk and share their thinking, and
many are open to reconsidering their opinions. Join us, please!

EQCA, along with GLAAD and LGBT family groups like Our Family Coalition and
COLAGE, is also launching a speakers bureau to get out the stories of the more
than 18,000 same-sex couples who are already married in California. There is no
better way of demonstrating that the scare tactics of our opponents are untrue
than by introducing Californians to these couples, at places of worship, social
clubs, chambers of commerce--any place where we can get an audience.

Opening the Suggestion Box

There's been a ton of messaging research done recently, so we're compiling
all of it and then opening up the suggestion box wide. We want to be bold and
creative about which messages, messengers and audiences we focus on, so we are
asking our members and people across the nation for their ideas. We will try out
different approaches in pilot projects, rigorously evaluating them every step of
the way to see which actually move people and to find out the characteristics of
those individuals who have moved. Then we can take what we learn to scale.

In partnership with California Faith for Equality and the California Council
of Churches, we will educate Californians about the difference between civil and
religious marriage. EQCA is sponsoring a bill recently introduced by Sen. Mark
Leno, which highlights the distinction between civil and religious marriage and
lays out explicitly that no clergy can be compelled to perform marriages for
same-sex couples. Through lobby visits in Sacramento, hearings, op-eds, online
actions and more, we will use this year to highlight this bill and take away
another scare tactic that our opponents use: saying that clergy who don't
perform marriages for same-sex couples will lose their tax exemption.

In my many years of working on this issue, I can tell you that the most
effective way to move people our way is to share our stories. There are far too
many straight people who do not support our rights and who have LGBT friends and
family members. As frustrating as it might feel, it's our job to get them to
support our rights--each and every one of us. There's nothing else we can do
that is more important than having these conversations. I've seen older aunts
and uncles, neighbors and friends, move on the issue simply through a heart-felt
conversation about why marriage is important to their friend or loved one.

Our suggestion box is wide open. Please leave me a comment or email me directly if you have thoughts or ideas.
Together, we will build a California with majority support for marriage
equality.